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Now showing 1 - 10 of 25
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    A Survey on Reinforcement Learning Methods in Character Animation
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022) Kwiatkowski, Ariel; Alvarado, Eduardo; Kalogeiton, Vicky; Liu, C. Karen; Pettré, Julien; Panne, Michiel van de; Cani, Marie-Paule; Meneveaux, Daniel; Patanè, Giuseppe
    Reinforcement Learning is an area of Machine Learning focused on how agents can be trained to make sequential decisions, and achieve a particular goal within an arbitrary environment. While learning, they repeatedly take actions based on their observation of the environment, and receive appropriate rewards which define the objective. This experience is then used to progressively improve the policy controlling the agent's behavior, typically represented by a neural network. This trained module can then be reused for similar problems, which makes this approach promising for the animation of autonomous, yet reactive characters in simulators, video games or virtual reality environments. This paper surveys the modern Deep Reinforcement Learning methods and discusses their possible applications in Character Animation, from skeletal control of a single, physically-based character to navigation controllers for individual agents and virtual crowds. It also describes the practical side of training DRL systems, comparing the different frameworks available to build such agents.
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    Quadruped Animation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2008) Skrba, Ljiljana; Reveret, Lionel; Hetroy, Franck; Cani, Marie-Paule; O'Sullivan, Carol; Theoharis Theoharis and Philip Dutre
    Films like Shrek, Madagascar, The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlotte s web all have something in common: realistic quadruped animations. While the animation of animals has been popular for a long time, the technical challenges associated with creating highly realistic, computer generated creatures have been receiving increasing attention recently. The entertainment, education and medical industries have increased the demand for simulation of realistic animals in the computer graphics area. In order to achieve this, several challenges need to be overcome: gathering and processing data that embodies the natural motion of an animal which is made more difficult by the fact that most animals cannot be easily motion-captured; build accurate kinematic models for animals, in particular with adapted animation skeletons; and develop either kinematic or physically-based animation methods, either embedding some a priori knowledge about the way that quadrupeds locomote and/or building on some example of real motion. In this state of the art report, we present an overview of the common techniques used to date for realistic quadruped animation. This includes an outline of the various ways that realistic quadruped motion can be achieved, through video-based acquisition, physics based models, inverse kinematics, or some combination of the above. The research presented represents a cross fertilisation of vision, graphics and interaction methods.
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    PointCloudSlicer: Gesture-based Segmentation of Point Clouds
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Gowtham, Hari Hara; Parakkat, Amal Dev; Cani, Marie-Paule; Babaei, Vahid; Skouras, Melina
    Segmentation is a fundamental problem in point-cloud processing, addressing points classification into consistent regions, the criteria for consistency being based on the application. In this paper, we introduce a simple, interactive framework enabling the user to quickly segment a point cloud in a few cutting gestures in a perceptually consistent way. As the user perceives the limit of a shape part, they draw a simple separation stroke over the current 2D view. The point cloud is then segmented without needing any intermediate meshing step. Technically, we find an optimal, perceptually consistent cutting plane constrained by user stroke and use it for segmentation while automatically restricting the extent of the cut to the closest shape part from the current viewpoint. This enables users to effortlessly segment complex point clouds from an arbitrary viewpoint with the possibility of handling self-occlusions.
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    Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Cordonnier, Guillaume; Braun, Jean; Cani, Marie-Paule; Benes, Bedrich; Galin, Éric; Peytavie, Adrien; Guérin, Éric; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    At large scale, landscapes result from the combination of two major processes: tectonics which generate the main relief through crust uplift, and weather which accounts for erosion. This paper presents the first method in computer graphics that combines uplift and hydraulic erosion to generate visually plausible terrains. Given a user-painted uplift map, we generate a stream graph over the entire domain embedding elevation information and stream flow. Our approach relies on the stream power equation introduced in geology for hydraulic erosion. By combining crust uplift and stream power erosion we generate large realistic terrains at a low computational cost. Finally, we convert this graph into a digital elevation model by blending landform feature kernels whose parameters are derived from the information in the graph. Our method gives high-level control over the large scale dendritic structures of the resulting river networks, watersheds, and mountains ridges.
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    A Review of Digital Terrain Modeling
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Galin, Eric; Guérin, Eric; Peytavie, Adrien; Cordonnier, Guillaume; Cani, Marie-Paule; Benes, Bedrich; Gain, James; Giachetti, Andrea and Rushmeyer, Holly
    Terrains are a crucial component of three-dimensional scenes and are present in many Computer Graphics applications. Terrain modeling methods focus on capturing landforms in all their intricate detail, including eroded valleys arising from the interplay of varied phenomena, dendritic mountain ranges, and complex river networks. Set against this visual complexity is the need for user control over terrain features, without which designers are unable to adequately express their artistic intent. This article provides an overview of current terrain modeling and authoring techniques, organized according to three categories: procedural modeling, physically-based simulation of erosion and land formation processes, and example-based methods driven by scanned terrain data. We compare and contrast these techniques according to several criteria, specifically: the variety of achievable landforms; realism from both a perceptual and geomorphological perspective; issues of scale in terms of terrain extent and sampling precision; the different interaction metaphors and attendant forms of user-control, and computation and memory performance. We conclude with an in-depth discussion of possible research directions and outstanding technical and scientific challenges.
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    Interactive Flat Coloring of Minimalist Neat Sketches
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Parakkat, Amal Dev; Madipally, Prudhviraj; Gowtham, Hari Hara; Cani, Marie-Paule; Wilkie, Alexander and Banterle, Francesco
    We introduce a simple Delaunay-triangulation based algorithm for the interactive coloring of neat line-art minimalist sketches, ie. vector sketches that may include open contours. The main objective is to minimize user intervention and make interaction as natural as with the flood-fill algorithm while extending coloring to regions with open contours. In particular, we want to save the user from worrying about parameters such as stroke weight and size. Our solution works in two steps, 1) a segmentation step in which the input sketch is automatically divided into regions based on the underlying Delaunay structure and 2) the interactive grouping of neighboring regions based on user input. More precisely, a region adjacency graph is computed from the segmentation result, and is interactively partitioned based on user input to generate the final colored sketch. Results show that our method is as natural as a bucket fill tool and powerful enough to color minimalist sketches.
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    Pair Correlation Functions with Free-Form Boundaries for Distribution Inpainting and Decomposition
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Nicolet, Baptiste; Ecormier-Nocca, Pierre; Memari, Pooran; Cani, Marie-Paule; Wilkie, Alexander and Banterle, Francesco
    Pair Correlation Functions (PCF) have been recently spreading as a reliable representation for distributions, enabling the efficient synthesis of point-sets, vector textures and object placement from examples. In this work we introduce a triangulationbased local filtering method to extend PCF-based analysis to exemplars with free-form boundaries. This makes PCF applicable to new problems such as the inpainting of missing parts in an input distribution, or the decomposition of complex, non-homogeneous distributions into a set of coherent classes, in which each category of points can be studied together with their intra and inter-class correlations.
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    Mutable Elastic Models for Sculpting Structured Shapes
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013) Milliez, Antoine; Wand, Michael; Cani, Marie-Paule; Seidel, Hans-Peter; I. Navazo, P. Poulin
    In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for free-form shape deformation. Standard deformable models minimize an energy measuring the distance to a single target shape. We propose a new, ''mutable'' elastic model. It represents complex geometry by a collection of parts and measures the distance of each part measures to a larger set of alternative rest configurations. By detecting and reacting to local switches between best-matching rest states, we build a 3D sculpting system: It takes a structured shape consisting of parts and replacement rules as input. The shape can subsequently be elongated, compressed, bent, cut, and merged within a constraints-based free-form editing interface, where alternative rest-states model to such changes. In practical experiments, we show that the approach yields a surprisingly intuitive and easy to implement interface for interactively designing objects described by such discrete shape grammars, for which direct shape control mechanisms were typically lacking.
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    Collision Handling and its Applications
    (The Eurographics Association, 2006) Teschner, Matthias; Cani, Marie-Paule; Fedkiw, Ron; Bridson, Robert; Redon, Stephane; Volino, Pascal; Zachmann, Gabriel; Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann and Katja Bühler
    In contrast to real-world scenarios, object representations in virtual environments have no notion of interpenetration. Therefore, algorithms for the detection of interfering object representations are an essential component in virtual environments. Applications are wide-spread and can be found in areas such as surgery simulation, games, cloth simulation, and virtual prototyping. Early collision detection approaches have been presented in robotics and computational geometry more than twenty years ago. Nevertheless, collision detection is still a very active research topic in computer graphics. This ongoing interest is constantly documented by new results presented in journals and at major conferences, such as Siggraph and Eurographics. In order to enable a realistic behavior of interacting objects in dynamic simulations, collision detection algorithms have to be accompanied by collision response schemes.
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    Crowd Sculpting: A Space-time Sculpting Method for Populating Virtual Environments
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Jordao, Kevin; Pettré, Julien; Christie, Marc; Cani, Marie-Paule; B. Levy and J. Kautz
    We introduce "Crowd Sculpting": a method to interactively design populated environments by using intuitive deformation gestures to drive both the spatial coverage and the temporal sequencing of a crowd motion. Our approach assembles large environments from sets of spatial elements which contain inter-connectible, periodic crowd animations. Such a Crowd Patches approach allows us to avoid expensive and difficult-to-control simulations. It also overcomes the limitations of motion editing, that would result into animations delimited in space and time. Our novel methods allows the user to control the crowd patches layout in ways inspired by elastic shape sculpting: the user creates and tunes the desired populated environment through stretching, bending, cutting and merging gestures, applied either in space or time. Our examples demonstrate that our method allows the space-time editing of very large populations and results into endless animation, while offering real-time, intuitive control and maintaining animation quality.